What This Devil Wants
by That Girl Six
Summary: The longer this goes, the shorter his fuse gets. Opie Winston has a lot of thinking to do.


**Disclaimer:** No infringement intended; just spreading of creative happiness. This one is **rated R** for lots of language, but that's it. This will undoubtedly become AU by the end of the season, but until then, I wrote this after 2X01, so apply your appropriate **spoiler** warnings from there.

**Author's Notes:** So here's my first SOA fic. I'm not sure how I feel about it other than that I'm glad I tried to move into a fandom that has nothing to do with ghosts, demons, or magic of any kind other than the love that keeps people together. If you find an error, don't be afraid to tell me. Thanks for taking the time whether you comment or not. (Please, no spoilers in the comments.) Enjoy! Six

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**What This Devil Wants**  
_by That Girl Six_

Opie Winston is not dumb. It's an easy assumption people made about him back in the days of BMX bikes out in the vacant lot where he and Jax had dug out the pits and built the dirt ramps to spend their summer days. How was he going to amount to anything if all he did over the summer was bang up his knees and hide in the chest high cocklebur bushes to smoke and jerk off to the skin mags he ripped from Tig's designated porn closet? Him going off to prison for five years was nothing more than the town's self-fulfilling prophecy as far as they were concerned. He was too dumb to know to get out, to head for the hills, to not become his old man.

He wasn't that dumb, though. People could think whatever they wanted, but he knew better.

When that bitch agent opened the interrogation room door, he knew right then and there he was up a creek without a godforsaken paddle. All Stahl had to say was "bank account" to let him know he was dead (and painfully because, let's face it, Clay doesn't exactly take sneezing on him lightly, let alone shitting on everything he's done for his entire adult life). Opie knew it didn't matter who pulled the trigger. She had killed him just as sure as he had taken Donna's virginity when they were thirteen (in her sister's bedroom, if you're interested). He knew it wasn't going to matter what he had to say when the bitch turned him loose; Clay would have already made up his mind. He'd been around enough to know that much. His only ace was Jax, and he damn well knew it. That wasn't so dumb.

He started trying to put it all together the moment Donna walked out of that office with him. Her hand in his was it. It had taken five years of fights and threats and scares, but she'd hung the moon back up in the sky where it belonged, and that moon started whispering to him the sweet nothings that he needed to know to keep his family safe. Then she was gone, and he knew that he didn't need to listen to anyone but himself. He was smarter than they thought. He saw things. He saw people. And he saw Clay and Tig. He wasn't dumb. At first, he'd thought he had to figure things out fast, but with Donna gone, he had time now. He had plenty of time to figure things out and get it right. As long as no one knew what that voice in his head was saying, he was all right.

So he thought. He plotted and imagined and thrilled and waited. It wasn't like anyone saw him past the guy who'd just lost his wife anyway. It was the quietest his thoughts had ever been.

He let Gemma and his mom plan the funeral for the most part. What did he know about funerals? You go, you stand there looking solemn and try not to laugh, and then you have cake. If anyone were to ask right now, he couldn't tell how much the coffin had cost or how much the kids' proper clothes were. His mom and Gemma took care of that, too. Jax tried to take care of him, but he wasn't ready to be taken care of yet. He didn't want to be handled. The bruises on his father's knuckles said that maybe his old man needed to be handled, though. Talk about being dumb . . .

He knows everyone thinks he's being dumb now, too. In their books, dumb and numb are close enough to be the same thing. Pop's little pep talk made that kinda obvious. He knows his father means well, but it isn't the same. Mom left. She _made a choice_ to go. All of his and Donna's choices were taken from them. It isn't the same. But he had to give Pop points for trying. The man wasn't Ward Cleaver, but he was a good man and wanted the best for his kid and grandkids. He loved the man for it, even if it meant a little beat down now and then. Besides, it gave his father purpose right now. He wasn't dumb enough to think that the bruises on Pop's knuckles meant he didn't give a damn.

Sometimes he catches Jax watching him, and he wonders if his best friend knows yet. He wonders if he knows that Opie isn't being dumb at all. Some things just take longer to think about than others. Probably the only person who would know that right now is Jax. He hopes the man knows. The kid who built the BMX with him would know.

That kid would play along.

It's when the kids are asleep that he worries on things the most. He watches them breathe, so much more comfortable than he was with it when they were babies. No one tells you when you have little, little ones that they breathe fast because they have smaller lungs that fill quicker than adults' do. No one tells you not to worry, that it's normal; they just send you home with this fragile little thing that you're going to have to guess at for the rest of your life with a "she's beautiful" and "congratulations", no instruction manual. He didn't sleep the first month that they brought Ellie home. She'd seemed so impossibly small, so in need of his every protection. And Kenny had been even worse; he'd had such a rattle in his chest that he'd constantly sounded like he was dying. Opie thought about that a lot when he watched them sleep now, how they were still breathing and it wasn't so scary. It was the protection part that was scary now. If he couldn't bring back their mother, how was he going to take care of them now? Alone?

He thinks maybe they're all fucked. What about this situation wasn't?

And then Ellie rolls over and puts her arm over Kenny, who nuzzles her back. Both safe. Both loved. They have each other, whether he knows how to be the father they need him to be or not. Maybe he's the only one who's fucked. He hopes they can take care of each other long enough for him to be done with what he has to do. Then he'll be okay. Then he can be a father.

He and Jax, when this is done, are going to be the best damn fathers Charming has ever seen. If they make it through. . .

He thinks Jax knows about Clay. There's something about the way Jax sits there and glares at Clay now that things have changed. It started before Donna, but now it's something a blind man could see in bright neon green and blood red letters. It's barely contained and vicious, and Opie is going to enjoy the hell out of the show until he has to pull Jax off long enough to get his own piece. If they had ever been a family — Clay, Gemma, and Jax — they aren't gonna be a family when this is over. For his part, Opie had never really liked Clay and Gemma together; John was and always would be Jax's dad, and as hard as they could be sometimes, John and Piney were the dads that they wanted to live up to. Clay could never be that. Especially now. As much as Jax loves his old lady and loves Clay for her, Opie also knows that he's family before Clay. Brothers trump step-fathers any day.

If Jax knows that Opie knows, though, he isn't saying. It's kinda funny the way they catch each other watching each other. The hardest part is watching Jax watch him. He's trying so damn hard, trying to be the supportive brother, be the best friend, be the kid who helped him hobble to the hospital on the broken leg after falling out of the tree. He's doing everything he can to make that Band-Aid stick just a little longer. Or maybe he's just waiting for the bottle to explode, too.

He thinks — well, hopes — that Jax will catch on for sure before things get too sideways, as if this wasn't already beyond sideways.

Until then, he's going to play the perfect soldier. Clay will like that. Anything he does differently right now is going to be chalked up to Donna and him figuring out how to go on without her. He had never used his girl, not ever, but this one time he didn't think she'd mind so much. He'll be a good boy, do the public grief whenever it's necessary (no matter how awful), and say her name as often as he can in front of the bastards who murdered her. If it keeps him safe for their kids, he's going to use her. When he's done, thanks to her, no one will have seen this coming.

It's when he's slicing chicken and vegetables for the kids' quesadillas for dinner that he decides he'll use a blade when the time comes. It's intimate and painful, just like fucking a virgin. And he wants it to hurt. He wants Clay to hurt as much as he does and then some. With Tig, he'll use a gun. The guy is too dumb to have done this on his own. A dumb weapon deserves a dumb guy.

He bursts out laughing the most inappropriate laugh, high and tittering, until he's sobbing.

A brain for a brain.

It's awful and disgusting and Tig will deserve to have his brain smeared all over the bar. He did it to her first.

Donna wasn't done with hers yet, though. And that's what hurts the most. She wasn't done, not by a long shot.

And then he's angry and wanting to skip the middle of the movie and go straight over there now, all Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, if he could just end this all right now. He slices the hell out of his finger when he loses control of the blade, oozing all over the kids' green peppers.

Pizza it is.

While they're sitting in a booth with torn red vinyl and remnants of the last customers there, they are given condolences by Kenny's teacher and her husband. It makes him flinch to hear her call him Opie. That name used to mean something, even if it was a little sentimental and childish.

He thinks that for the first time in his life that his idiotic nickname will work to his advantage. That little red-headed kid with the perfect manners and adorable lisp may be long gone, but he knew that since that's how his old man saw him, so the others did, too. So he'd be that kid with manners and _yes, sir_ and the right reactions in all the right places. The nice kid doesn't believe in revenge; Pa and Aunt Bee would never allow it. When the backdraft comes, he's going to make it the most horribly feral thing he can so that no one will ever forget.

It doesn't matter who you are, Clarence Morrow: You don't take a man's wife. And this devil is going to make you pay.

He thinks it might be a little melodramatic to put it that way, but that's okay. Donna would appreciate it. She liked it when, as she put it, Opie Cunningham grew up. This Opie Cunningham was going to grow a pair, oh fuck yeah.

He stops thinking long enough the next morning and the morning after that and the morning after that to get the babies off to school, because that's what he's been told to do. He takes in the scent of No More Tears shampoos in their hair and silently promises them that he _is_ thinking of them. They might not know it right now, and he hopes they'll forgive him for it someday. He thinks they will, because they are both more Opie-ish than he ever was or ever will be again.

He promises them on the way out the door that he loves them. When Pop has them in the car and on the road, he trudges into their bedroom. It isn't long before he has her pillow between his thighs, smelling her, feeling her, wishing like hell it could be her. He weeps into her second pillow as he thrusts into the other. He knows he isn't going to have love again, not like that. They were part of each other from the time they were kids. That's the thing that Clay doesn't get; he'll never see Op coming because he doesn't know love like that. He doesn't know what it's like to know from the day you saw her pigtails and the dirt tracks on her cheeks that she was The One. And that's why he's going to get away with it.

When he's in the shower, he thinks again. He doesn't think he can stop now. Always watching, always seeing. The looks between Clay and Tig, the glares and slammed doors between Clay and Jax, the nods between Jax and Pop — they are all going to add up to the right picture. They're going to tell him how to do this. They're going to tell him when the time is right. They're going to tell him how to make this right.

And all he has to do is sit there and think. And wait. And miss his wife.

He thinks when this is all over, he'd like to just be Harry again. Being Harry and being Daddy maybe wouldn't be such a bad thing.

_September 2009_


End file.
